


if you love somebody

by ladyzanra



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Coda, Episode Tag, M/M, Season/Series 09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-21
Updated: 2014-01-21
Packaged: 2018-01-09 05:46:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1142182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyzanra/pseuds/ladyzanra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Sam, Dean, and Cas talk-triangle that doesn't end where it began.</p><p>coda for 9.10</p>
            </blockquote>





	if you love somebody

  
Cas doesn't know whether Dean’s look means _stop me from leaving_ or _I’m sorry you can’t._

Maybe it simply means _goodbye_.  
  
Cas looks down until Dean’s walking away. Then he slips up silently next to Sam, hands balled up in his pockets, and follows Dean the rest of the way with his eyes. The Impala rumbles to life. After a few moments, it’s clear to Cas that there’s no music playing inside. Whether that’s something that can be told at this distance, or whether Cas is tapping into his angel powers to hear it, or rather the lack of it, he’s not sure. All he knows is the silence.  
  
It goes with Dean as the car drives off, a cancerous specter in the empty passenger seat and under Dean’s fingers; and it stays here on the bridge, sharpening the rain and gilding the yellow puddles at Cas’s feet, sliding down his face and the back of his neck. His body goes strangely rigid with it, muscle by muscle, until he can feel the Grace whirring and crackling against his locked bones. He rouses himself and turns to Sam.  
  
Sam is his main focus right now. Dean wants Cas to finish healing him, so that’s what Cas is going to do. His immediate course of action is simple.

If his stolen wings hadn’t been so damaged in the fall, he would wrap them around Sam for shelter and warmth, like he’d done for the both of them so many times in the past. But they’re so splintered and frayed and singed that Cas can hardly move them at all (and if even he could, they wouldn’t be much of a shelter anyway). So he just stands there and keeps Sam company, waiting for as long as seems appropriate, giving Sam time and space before he speaks.  
  
“We should get out of the rain. You’re still not fully healed.” When Sam doesn’t respond, he adds, “I know how to turn on the heat.”  
  
Sam looks at him.  
  
“In my car,” Cas clarifies.  
  
It’s probably just a gesture of mercy towards Cas’s awkwardly phrased offer that Sam follows him back to the Continental, but Cas is grateful for it anyway.  
  
  
\--  
  
  
Silence reigns in Cas’s car, too. Cas has seen too much and too little at the same time, and they both know it. It’s much harder to know where the ‘line’ is with Sam, and so Cas doesn’t know what would be crossing it. He glances at Sam from time to time, but doesn't go any further than that. Sam is exhausted and probably in pain, if the way he sinks deep and dead into the seat is anything to go by. He’s been running on angel mojo for months now; even if the disaster with Dean hadn’t happened, suddenly pulling the plug on that healing energy is bound to be a nasty shock. He is probably too drained and disoriented for any sort of difficult conversation.  
  
About an hour in, Sam starts to drift off, but he can never manage to fall asleep for long. When he closes his eyes he becomes too fitful and feverish to keep them that way. Cas reaches over and gently sends Sam into a real sleep, a dreamless one. A peaceful one.  
  
Cas is alone.  
  
He listens to the patter of the rain and the swoop of the wipers and watches the blurred lights and the way the signs streak past.  
  
He thinks of Dean driving in solitude right now, hands on the wheel just like Cas’s hands are on his own. It makes him feel closer to Dean, like they’re still connected somehow, alone _together_.  
  
It’s a lie. But it gives him some comfort, for as long as it lasts.  
  
When they arrive at the bunker, some time around noon the next day, the connection dissolves. Dean’s not there. Dean is _always_ at the bunker, whenever Cas goes there, as if his presence projects the polished cavernous rooms and they can’t exist without him. Yet here they are, silent and vacant. Dean’s absence is tangible and everywhere, a knot that Cas can’t tug out of his thinking, that he sees wherever he looks.  
  
Sam and Cas stand on the threshold of the library, the room Cas had found him in, the room Dean had torn to pieces. It’s still a mess. Sam’s expression grows cold as he looks at it; he leaves first. Cas lingers. Something about the room or the memory of it confuses him. He stares at the smashed lamp, at the scattered papers, for a long time.  
  
Like he’d expected something of them that hadn’t, in the end, come to pass.  
  
  
\--  
  
  
Dean calls at one in the morning the next day.  
  
Cas is in the guest room closest to Sam’s room, lying flat on his back on the bed in the dark. He’d been trying to sleep, but there’d been no point. His body doesn’t require sleep anymore, even if his mind still seems to think it does.  
  
“Dean?”  
  
“How’s Sam doing?”  
  
Dean’s voice is tired and slow and thick. Cas knows; knows what Dean's holding in his hand, what he keeps refilling, what he keeps pouring down his throat like he hopes it will drown him.  
  
Cas doesn’t have to ask whether he means mentally or physically. “Better. I’ve begun the healing process and he’s proving responsive to it. I put him into a deep, restful sleep for tonight. It may be a week or more, but he _will_ be good as new.” Cas can at least be comforting by being thorough. “You should know, Dean -- " he starts, then glances down at the floor, which is as dark as the rest of the room. He decides to go on. “You didn’t do any lasting damage.”  
  
Dean doesn’t answer.  
  
Cas begins to feel something slip away, the silence wedge in and take its place. He has to say something else.  
  
“Where are you?”  
  
It only makes the silence grow worse; stretch on into a minute or more. Finally Dean says, “Thanks, Cas. For taking care of him.”  
  
“Dean--"  
  
Dean hangs up.  
  
  
Dean doesn’t call the next night. Or the night after that. Cas keeps trying to ‘sleep’, cell phone poised on his stomach, in the slight indent where the bottom of his tie used to rest. The phone refuses to light up with the little word ‘Dean’ and Cas becomes somewhat resentful toward it. All that ends up happening is that he starts to have little talks with the ceiling where talks with Dean are impossible.  
  
 _You aren’t poison.  
  
I thought I already told you that.  
  
I thought you’d begun to understand.  
_  
  
\--

Cas is surprised at the way Sam behaves without Dean around.  
  
That is... mostly normal.  
  
In between his healing ‘sessions’ with Cas, he reads in the library or on his laptop, much like Cas always sees him do. Researches about Gadreel or angels or something else entirely without any apparent distractions. Occasionally he bounces ideas off of Cas in the same way he’d always done with Dean (though he never confuses the two of them, he always treats Cas as Cas). He even gets genuinely excited here and there when a new idea or theory comes along. He seems to function the same with or without his brother.  
  
Except that Cas sees it sometimes. A deep, residing anger that Sam has learned to hide, even from himself, as someone who has been angry often in the past. Cas catches it in vague moments and feels it sometimes when he works at healing him.  
  
Sam doesn’t say a word about Dean until the third day, when he asks Cas if Dean has called him.  
  
“Yes. He called once to ask how you were.”  
  
Sam stiffens visibly and the muscles in his face twitch. His tone gets a little... odd. “And what did you tell him?”  
  
“The truth. That you’re doing better.”  
  
Whether Sam is fuming because Dean didn’t call him directly or because Dean checked up on him at all, Cas can’t tell.  
  
“He was worried about you,” Cas defends Dean. Then, gently: “He loves you, Sam.”  
  
“Yeah. Yeah, I know.”  
  
Sam buries himself in his research again after that. Cas sighs, feeling more confused and foolish than he already had.  
  
No matter what Cas does, he can’t get Sam to _talk_.  
  
  
\--  
  
  
On the sixth day, Cas announces that the only way he can rid Sam of the lasttraces of the demon trials is to possess him and purge him from the inside out. Given that possession is a touchy subject for Sam, at this point more than ever, Cas explains the situation as thoroughly and sympathetically as he can.  
  
Sam’s not very happy about it. But this is Cas, and besides, Cas reminds, Sam’s let in worse.  
  
Far worse. Try _Lucifer_.  
  
“All right.” Sam slaps his laptop shut. “It doesn’t seem like I have much of a choice.” He runs his hands through his hair. “Fifteen minutes, you said?”  
  
“Depending on what I find.”  
  
“Will I be conscious?”  
  
“Do you want to be?”  
  
“I mean, yeah, I think, but? Is it still like,” Sam gestures with his hand, “being  ‘strapped to a comet’? And I thought you could only possess people of certain bloodlines?”  
  
“This Grace that I have,” Cas explains, “it’s not mine. It belonged to a much less powerful angel. On top of that, he was weakened in the fall. His wings were heavily damaged. I doubt you’d explode from his power.”  
  
“Wait a minute, Cas,” Sam looks alarmed. “Are you okay? Hauling broken wings around?”  
  
“I’m fine. I don’t know about the ‘strapped to a comet’ part,” Cas admits. “I know a lot about humans now, but I don’t know that.”  
  
Not what it feels like to be possessed; not really. The junction where Theo’s Grace meets his own human body, where they’re hitched – where Cas feels like both at once, the human vessel and the angel – isn’t the same. _Self_ -possession is a whole new level of I-don’t-know.  
  
“It will probably be more useful to you if I’m conscious, won’t it?” Sam reasons.  
  
Cas nods.  
  
“Okay then.”  
  
Cas pulls up a chair next to him and sits down. “Before you let me in, is there anything you want to tell me?” He trains very large, serious eyes on Sam.  
  
“Uh. No?”  
  
“I’ll be in your head," Cas reminds. “Even conscious, you won’t have perfect control over what I see.”  
  
“Yeah.” Sam shrugs stiffly. “Okay, fine.”  
  
“Perhaps there’re some things you’d rather tell me yourself,” Cas persists.  
  
Sam stares back with defensive silence, like he’s trying to pass some test.  
  
"Sam." Cas glances down for a moment as if to soften the impending question, but he can’t help it that his voice is stone-steady and his countenance unflinching anyway when he looks back up. "Did you mean it when you told Dean you were ‘willing to die’?”  
  
Sam’s jaw works furiously for a while. “Yes.”  
  
Cas tilts his head, bewildered. “Why would you want to die?”  
  
“Why would I want to live?” It’s almost a retort, almost _moody_. Sam is suddenly every inch the younger brother of the two. “Haven’t I done enough harm? Caused enough – death?”  
  
“You and your brother _save_ people.”  
  
“Yeah,” Sam laughs. “We’re supposed to. We started out that way. Maybe now it’s just something we tell ourselves to try to justify all the – bodies and bloodshed we leave behind.” Sam’s being indulgent and dramatic. Sam is being _ridiculous._ But these emotions have been trapped away beneath the surface since the fight on the bridge, suffocating, warping. Cas kind of gets it, even in his current angelically abstract state: they need some air. “We were going to close the gates of Hell, _I_ was going to, and then. Well, everything else we do from here on out kind of pales in comparison. What’s the point of going after the wasps if we’re not going to go after the nest?”  
  
“Every little thing counts,” Cas leans forward earnestly. “Goodness isn’t an all-or-nothing thing, Sam. You do it in pieces, step by step. Besides, might it not be possible to cure some of the demons? I thought you were the one who _wanted_ to reach out to monsters, to understand them and help them.”  
  
“Not demons,” says Sam. “And not anymore. You try your best but it’s just one big slippery slope. It always ends the same way.”  
  
“So you just gave up.” It’s neither a question nor a statement.  
  
“There was nothing _to_ give up,” says Sam. “That’s the _point_.”  
  
“You stopped the apocalypse,” Cas says, incredulous. If anything would make you convinced that some things are worth fighting for, he thinks, wouldn't it be  _that?_  
  
“I started the apocalypse!”  
  
“ _I_ stopped it _with_ you,” Cas continues, his own jaw tightening. He is not immune to personal anger, to selfishness, even when he is filled with Grace. In fact, the combination peculiarly makes him more dangerous. “You’re telling me that what _we_ did didn’t have a point? You’re telling me that _I_ wasted my time?”  
  
Sam has nothing to say to that.  
  
“You didn’t intend for any of it to happen. It was a mistake. Sam…” Cas softens, stares at him sadly. “After all this time, after all you’ve done, are you still carrying that around with you?”  
  
“I thought,” Sam says through his teeth, low and thick, “that _you_ of all people would understand.”  
  
Cas feels. He doesn't know how he feels. Sam hasn’t made him feel this way since – since he accused him of leaving Sam’s soul in Hell intentionally. He’s ashamed and dismayed and horrified at once, shocked that Sam would take a shot at him when they are this close-range, while also one hundred percent convinced he deserved it.  
  
Cas is a hypocrite and he's naïve, if he thinks he’s an expert on these matters, if he thinks he’s qualified to give anyone advice about guilt and regret and mistakes. He hasn’t even managed to take the advice himself, not really. What he had told Dean about ‘being more trusting than dumbasses’ had sounded nice and almost true at the time, but he’d said it to help Dean more than anything. He’s not sure how he could have forgotten. The truth is, and had always been, that Dean’s mistakes can't  _begin_ to compare to Cas’s; and they never will.  
  
“No,” Cas says quietly. Even with his eyes lowered, it’s difficult to get out. “I suppose some things don’t go away.”  
  
“Like the apocalypse,” Sam's voice is bitter and uneven. “Like Kevin’s death.”  
  
“ _Hey._ Kevin’s. death. was. not. your. fault.”  
  
“It was my hand that did it. I remember it.”  
  
“You’re misunderstanding the basic concept of possession.”  
  
“So many people have died because of me. Why am I still here?”  
  
“Because of Dean,” Cas says fiercely.  
  
“Exactly. Dean saved me, again.” Sam thows up his hands. “For what? So that it could end up like, like this, chaos everywhere, angels and demons fighting in the streets, him off on some suicide mission? For once, I wish he’d just do us all a favor and fucking take care of _himself_.”  
  
“I agree with you there.” Cas thinks suddenly of the way Dean had sounded on the phone, depressed, inebriated. It makes him either worried or angry. He loses the thread with Sam for a moment.  
  
“I mean he acts like his one role in life is my protector. Like without me to look after, he has no purpose. It’s just. It’s bullshit! He sold his soul to a demon to bring me back and put himself in _Hell_.”  
  
“I know,” says Cas. “I was there. I saw.”  
  
Sam stares at Cas like he'd somehow forgotten that Cas is an angel.  
  
“I can’t,” Sam says. “I can’t bear it. Not anymore.” He swallows. “Maybe if he can’t see it, then it’s better that we stay apart. I mean it’s been how many years now, and he still hasn’t learned aynthing? Maybe he never will, and that’s that.”  
  
“You two are soul mates.” Cas takes the time to remind Sam how on-point his glare game is. “You’re meant to be together.”  
  
“By Heaven’s standard. And I’m pretty sure we’re not going there.”  
  
Cas rolls his eyes.  
  
“He needs to let me go. I’m killing him. He’s such a hypocrite! He wants me to be happy, but _he_ can’t be happy?”  
  
“He’s unhappy _now_ ,” Cas points out, “without you.”  
  
“I want him to be himself, to do what he wants to do. I want him to be Dean, not Sam’s Older Brother. _I_ want it. I want him to live for himself, Cas, so he can do the things that _he_ wants to do. So that we can stop all this whatever-it-takes soul-sacrificing crap.”  
  
Cas bristles a little. He has loftier opinions of Dean’s actions than Sam does. But… _he_ wants Dean to be happy too. And to not think of himself as ‘poison’.  
  
 _Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends._ And yet. What is it to lay down one’s life, if one has not claimed that life for one’s self in the first place? Maybe there’s some truth to what Sam is saying.  
  
“Well,” Cas looks away for a moment. “One thing’s for sure, he’s certainly not doing what he wants now.”  
  
Sam understands what Cas means. His expression becomes worried and irritated and not entirely surprised at once. “Maybe, uh, when I’m better, you could go after him?” he says suddenly.  
  
“Me? How could _I_ help? Nothing I said earlier helped him. Why would this be different?”  
  
“Because you’re different, Cas. You mean something to him.”  
  
“I don’t mean nearly as much as you do. He kicked me out of the bunker to keep you safe.” Cas is surprised at the resentment lingering in his voice. He had thought he’d purged himself of any bad feelings when he’d angel-upped.  
  
“Pretty sure that was the last thing he wanted to do. That was just – you were a casualty, so to speak.”  
  
“I don’t understand. He still did it. He still chose you over me.”  
  
“He chose me, yeah, but he didn’t… _really._ This isn’t about ‘choosing’. It doesn’t work like that.”  
  
“I don’t understand,” Cas says again. He squints for emphasis.  
  
Sam regards him hesitantly. “Hasn’t he, like. _Said_ anything to you?”  
  
Cas opens his mouth to answer no.  
  
But then his mind draws toward something dark, shadowy, stone-hewn, old; circles around it, draws tentatively and inevitably closer, closer.  
  
A memory he had tried to forget, because it was a moment of shame, because it had been one of Cas’s mistakes. Three perplexing, frightening words. Words heavy and inexplicable, as broken as the bones of Dean’s arm beneath Cas’s fingers, as bright as the blood painting his face in unreadable, distorted symbols.  
  
Cas had woken up by them. They had split stone in two. Then he had touched the angel tablet and been distracted away from them, filled with some other purpose, some other, bright future coursing through his veins…  
  
A deception, it had turned out, while the three words still remain.  
  
“He hasn’t?” Sam raises his eyebrows very high. “Of course he hasn’t,” he shakes his head and smiles ironically at a corner of the ceiling. “ _Goddamnit, Dean."_ He looks at Cas. "You two have some talking to do.”  
  
Cas realizes he doesn’t want to have this conversation with Sam.  
  
He very much does not want to. He wants to package it up nice and neat and small and take it away somewhere by himself and open it up again in secret.  
  
He stands up. “Listen, Sam. You’re wrong if you think that things are going to stay this way, that they _should_ stay this way, that you and Dean will remain apart. He _will_ come back. You two will fix things again because you always do. In the meantime. I would re-evaluate the conflict from a different angle; it’s possible that some of those things you said about Dean are also true of yourself.”  
  
Sam looks at once indignant and surprised. Confused. “Wait, where are you going? Aren’t you going to, you know, possess me?”  
  
Cas turns around in the doorway. “I lied. You’re already fully healed. I didn’t know how else to get you to talk.”  
  
Sam’s mouth slides open.  
  
“Sometimes you Winchesters can be quite the handful.” Cas gives him a long-suffering look.  
  
  
\--  
  
  
Cas knows how to respond to Dean the next time Dean calls.  
  
“How’s Sam?” comes the non-greeting, rough and worn and thankless against Cas’s ear. The darkness of the room only makes it rawer.  
  
“Well hello to you too, Dean.”  
  
It’s been nine days since Dean called last; since Dean called the first time. This is only the second time. Like the first time, Cas can tell instantly that Dean's been drinking.  
  
Cas should probably be more careful of scaring Dean off than he is. He’s not sure what’s come over him. Maybe too many nights spent waiting for a phone that wouldn’t ring, only to be sharply surprised by it ringing now. He can feel his vessel’s – _his_ – heart beating through the oceans of Grace inside him. He doesn’t know if it’s because of anger or nerves.  
  
Cas can see Dean’s reaction, somehow: Dean blinks a few times in surprise, then closes his eyes.  “Cas. I’m sorry. Please.” The last word comes out like a prayer.  
  
Cas sighs and sits himself up against the headboard. “Sam’s all healed now. It’s like he never took on the demon trials at all. I’m all done.”  
  
“Oh,” says Dean. He probably furrows his brow. “And uh, how long did it…”  
  
“I finished two days ago.”  
  
“Oh,” says Dean again. After what feels like a very long pause, he says, “Thanks, Cas. I really, uh, I mean, I appreciate it.”

Cas looks around the dark bedroom. He finds it strange that even though he can’t technically see anything, he knows the room so well by now that it’s almost like he can see everything after all, the little dresser and mirror opposite him, the bedposts, the design on the back of the door where his coat is hanging.  
  
With Sam healed, Cas’s purpose in the bunker is unclear. Dissolving.  
  
“Dean.”  
  
“Yeah?” Dean asks, a little too quickly.  
  
Cas misses him, the sensation like a sharp inhale of breath that goes too deep.  
  
“Sam and I have been doing some research on Gadreel. We thing there might be a slight residue of Gadreel’s Grace still in Sam, and if that’s true, then we might be able to track Gadreel through it.”  
  
“How do you know I haven’t already found that bastard and ganked him?”  
  
“Don’t be stupid,” says Cas.  
  
There’s a pause in which Dean probably looks at the glass of whiskey or whatever it is in his hand. His eyes are probably baggy and brooding. “Yeah, okay. _Go on_. Will it hurt Sam?”  
  
“No. It will simply remove the remaining Grace. Actually it would probably be preferrable for Sam’s sake to do this. Cas doesn’t say _for your sake too_ , but somehow it’s there anyway, and Cas is at once regretful and angry for regretting it.  
  
He listens helplessly to the silence fleshing it all out: the way Dean’s eyes go dark and self-hating all over again, the knot that forms in his throat, the merciless set to his jaw.  
  
The best thing to do is to back up, to retreat. To accommodate Dean’s self-destructive mood for the moment, simply so that it doesn’t get any worse.  
  
“We’ll try to track Gadreel in the morning,” Cas says. “If it does work, I’ll call you and give you the location. You do have an angel blade with you, right?”  
  
“Don’t be a dumbass, Cas.”  
  
A faint smile, unbidden, appears at the corner of Cas’s lips.  
  
“But uh…” Dean debates with himself for a moment and then says, “I might not be able to go after him tomorrow.”  
  
“What do you mean?”  
  
“I’m sort of already on a case,” Dean admits uncomfortably. “And I don’t want that sonofabitch walking this damn earth a single day longer than he as to, so maybe you and Sam can? You know?”  
  
“What case could be more important than Gadreel?”  
  
“I’m, uh,” Dean says. “Crowley.”  
  
“You’re going after Crowley?” Cas squints. “But you let him go.”  
  
“I’m helping him.”  
  
Cas is truly taken aback. This doesn’t compute in any way. “ _You’re. helping. Crowley?_ ”  
  
He listens for the reply until he realizes the reply is a click.  
  
Dean’s hung up on him again.  
  
  
This time, Cas calls back.  
  
  
\--  
  
  
It isn’t until the fifth time that Dean finally picks up again.  
  
“Cas, damn it, what do you want me to say?”  
  
“I don’t want you to say anything,” Cas hisses.  
  
“Crowley found me and he—”  
  
“I don’t need an explanation. I know what happened. I know Crowley.”  
  
“Well then what the fuck are we talking for?”  
  
“Do you remember when I raised you out of Hell?”  
  
“… _Cas_.” Cas knows Dean won’t hang up on this one. That this is maybe the the one thing he _can’t_ hang up on. “Don’t,” Dean pleads. “Just don’t.”  
  
“Do you remember it?”  
  
“No,” Dean admits. “I only remember being there.”  
  
“Your soul was in shreds. It was flayed, mutilated, almost unrecognizable as a human. It took me months to repair it.”  
  
“This is really helping my self-esteem,” Dean says.  
  
“Crowley is in charge of that Hell now. He will drag you back down there,” Cas ignores him. “That’s what he does.”  
  
“Well, we all ‘do what we do’, eh?”  
  
“It was a strange experience – restitching you. I’d never been so close to a human being before. Here I was practically submerged in you. The terrors of Hell howled around me, my brothers and sisters fighting to the death, and I could easily have given in to despair. It was unclear whether we would even make it out. But there was this light in you. This… unexplainable warmth. Even though you were so damaged. The contrast between you and the prison you were in was startling. It gave me hope.”  
  
Dean doesn’t say anything.  
  
“I was only able to fix you _because_ of you. If you hadn’t been worth saving in the first place – ”  
  
“Cas,” Dean croaks, sharp with warning.  
  
“ _Don’t. hang. up._ There’s something else. I’ve never told you. I watched you rake leaves.”  
  
“Uh,” says Dean. “Uh. What?”  
  
“That’s when Crowley found _me_ , that time – that first time. I had come to ask you for help, but when I saw the life you had built up, when I saw you safe and content – as content as you could be – I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to take that life away from you or burden you. Or put you in danger. That’s why I went off with Crowley instead.”  
  
“Damn it, Cas. I would have helped you.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“I would have _wanted_ to. You didn’t even give me a choice.”  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“Why are you telling me this?” Dean asks, impossibly weary.  
  
“When I said we were both ‘trusting’, I was mistaken. I should have said we were trusting of the wrong people, and that we don’t trust the people we love enough.”  
  
When Dean finally speaks, his voice is barely audible, broken. “It’s too late.”  
  
“I won’t ask you to come back. I won’t chase after you.” Cas feels shaken and undone and _determined_ at once. “I won’t lecture you about Sam, because he’s your brother, not mine. You’re free to do whatever you want. But you _have_ to end this with Crowley. You have to escape. Otherwise I have no idea what will happen.”  
  
Suddenly Cas has lost his instinctive insight into Dean’s reactions, Dean’s mood, his expressions. It is all blank on the other end of the line.  
  
“I need you,” Cas says. “I need you to be okay.” He takes a breath and feels a shuddering heat spread through his chest. “I love you.”  
  
When Dean hangs up on him a third time, Cas has to smile a little, bitterly, at the way the circle completes itself.

 

\--

 

He and Sam figure out how to extract the rest of Gadreel’s Grace.  
  
Tracking Gadreel, however, proves to be more difficult than anticipated. They spend hours re-researching, retesting. They spend days.  
  
Sam goes out from time to time: goes grocery shopping, goes on a run, just goes, without saying where. He gets calls from other hunters, does research for them. Sometimes Cas overhears him explaining that ‘Dean’s taking a break right now’ and ‘yeah, well, the life wears down on you and you know, sometimes you just need some air.’  
  
Cas watches the television. He watches the news to glean information on the angel situation and when he can’t watch that anymore, he watches infomercials and baking shows and some show called _Criminal Minds_ which is on almost all the time. Food still tastes like molecules. He is still unable to sleep.  
  
Dean doesn’t come back.  
  
He doesn’t call. And until Cas figures out how to track Gadreel, he won’t call Dean either.  
  
Cas worries.  
  
Now that Sam is better, Cas is free to think about what he will. He feels no obligation to quell his feelings for the sake of concentrating on a greater cause.  
  
He thinks about Dean working with Crowley. He imagines all sorts of terrible things happening to him, and even Gadreel cannot compete with how much Cas hates Crowley, now.  
  
Cas thinks he has never hated Crowley so much. He thinks he should have killed him when he had the chance. If he ever runs into Crowley again, he _will_ kill him, just for this.  
  
He is not angry at Dean. He has no right to be.  
  
He has no right to be hurt. He was the one who hurt Dean first.  
  
He despairs of Dean. That’s different.

At night in the dark he analyzes their last phone call and he cannot figure out where he went wrong with it, what he said that failed, once again, to convince Dean. He had thought he’d been doing the right thing. The loving thing. Now he is weighed down by his failure, stifled by the silence. This silence is worse than the silence on the bridge. It is fully grown, it is dead. It is like discovering that the earth is flat after all, that you’re up against the edge and have no where else to go.  
  
He shouldn’t have risked it. He shouldn’t have been so resolved.  
  
On the fifth day, Cas considers going after Dean anyway, going back on _some_ of what he said. Just – he tells himself – to stop Crowley. He still wouldn’t tell Sam (Dean hadn’t told him to keep it secret but Cas had understood that he should). But maybe Sam should know? Sam surely can’t intend for their fight to cost Dean his life. Maybe Cas bears more responsibilty here than he thought. Maybe Cas should intervene after all.

  
He sits down and furrows his brows at the table. He does this for a long time. He doesn’t realize Sam has walked around him and up the stairs to open the door until the door opens and he remembers that the bunker doesn’t get visitors.  
  
He looks up.  
  
Dean is battered and bruised; there’s a deep cut extending from his forehead down over his right eye to almost his jaw, probably one of Crowley's parting gifts. But he’s standing and he’s breathing. He’s alive. He’s okay.  
  
“Heya, Sam,” he says awkwardly, and swallows. Smiles, small and unsure. "We, uh. We need to talk.”  
  
Cas feels every muscle in his body loosen, let go. He lets his face drop into his hands in relief.


End file.
